Skype coughs up to UK phone snag

Eventually...

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Skype - which is "not a telephony replacement service and cannot be used for emergency dialings" - says it's now fixed a problem that hit some of its UK users.

Punters complained that their SkypeIn service, which gives them their own regular phone number so non Skype users can call them, was floored for most of last week.

Despite reassurances the snags had been sorted out, a short service statement issued yesterday said: "Unfortunately there are again problems with UK numbers. The providers are working on it right now. Skype is apologising for the inconvenience."

However, users say this just isn't good enough. Not only was the service down, users also complained at the lack of communication from the internet telephony outfit.

Replying to Skype's update, one hacked off user wrote on the VoIP operator's forum: "Mine never got fixed in the first place. So if they fix this problem, how do they know I was not effected by the original problem and still will be when they fix this one, or is it the same problem..? You see, if you [Skype] had told us what was going on and what the problem was, I would not be getting so frustrated."

Another wrote: "They've shot themselves in the foot with this one and lost a lot of credibility. Anyone who needs a reliable service with backup support when it goes wrong will probably be crossing Skype off their list."

Indeed, El Reg's attempts to speak to someone at Skype have proved equally fruitless. No one has bothered to return calls so we've been unable to find out the nature of the problem or how many people were caught up in the cock-up.

Instead, Skype managed to get this statement through to us: "Unfortunately SkypeIn did have an outage in some areas in the UK last week. As of today [Monday], all the affected numbers are up and running smoothly again. We apologise for any inconvenience to our customers." ®